


Yours Are the Hands

by fizzygingr



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Religion, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2015-05-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 14:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3981007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fizzygingr/pseuds/fizzygingr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Christ has no body now but yours," Sister Rosemary had told him in school. As the blood dripped down of his knuckles, he wondered if his hands were still Christ's hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yours Are the Hands

_“Christ has no body now but yours,”_ Sister Rosemary had been fond of saying. It was a quote from some Saint (Mother Teresa?), and Matt’s friend had informed him that it was written on one of those cheesy inspirational posters on the wall of her classroom.  
“Is it in front of a sunset?” he’d asked.  
The kid (Jacob? Joseph? Matt couldn’t remember.) had laughed, and nodded before adding a hasty “Yeah.”  
And it had stuck with him. Years later, he’d looked up the quote in its entirety. “ _No hands, no feet on earth but yours,_ ” it read. In other words, if you want good, you have to do good.  
“ _Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world._ ” Well, his eyes were pretty useless, but he got the point. “Yours are the senses,” he’d corrected it in his head.  
“ _Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good._ ” He became aware of the feeling of his feet in his shoes. These feet would carry his body across a courtroom, would lead him to walk in the ways of righteousness.  
“ _Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world_.” He ran the fingers of his right hand over the palm of his left. Jesus’s hands, he knew, had been the rough hands of a carpenter, calloused and probably full of splinters, with sawdust deep under the fingernails. Matt’s own hands were soft and delicate, and his nails were carefully clipped. Callouses would only make it harder to read braille.  
But these hands, through reading and writing, would make a difference. They would stand up for justice; they would defend the innocent. “These are the hands,” he said softly to himself.

And now Matt’s hands were covered in blood, and he couldn’t tell if it was the other man’s or his own. His knuckles were bruised and aching. There was a cut on the back of his left hand from a shard of broken glass, and it burned like fire. And a line from the poem came back to him, while he had one hand on the man’s throat and the other raised in a fist.  
_“Yours are the hands…”_  
He brought his fist down on the man’s face, feeling the teeth crack beneath his knuckles.  
_“...through which he blesses all the world.”_  
He struck again. The man howled in pain, and blood from his nose seeped between Matt’s fingers.  
Were these Christ’s hands? The hands that had been laid in blessing on countless heads? The same hands, Matt told himself, had held a whip and driven the money-changers out of the temple. There had been rage in those hands, a pure and righteous rage against injustice. But had those hands ever beaten a man until he begged for mercy?  
The man beneath him stopped screaming. His heart continued to beat, and Matt knew he would live, but he still felt sick.  
_“Yours are the hands…”_  
His hands were throbbing and wet with blood.  
_“...yours are the feet…”_  
His feet stepped over the man, lying in a crumpled heap on the ground, and ran off into the night.  
_“...yours are the eyes….”_  
He laughed bitterly this time. If these were God’s eyes then God couldn’t see shit. He knew better than God what it felt like to have rage boil inside of you, to stand face-to-face with a man who had killed, who had attacked your city, threatened what you loved.  
Jesus stood face-to-face with the devil himself, a voice in his head told him. But the devil didn’t have such a satisfying response to a punch.  
_“...you are his body.”_  
If you want good, you have to do good. And that’s what he was doing, wasn’t it? He was doing good. The blood dripped down off his knuckles. Sometimes good could look ugly.  
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Brooke (yet_intrepid) for encouraging me to write this!


End file.
